I’m not an economist, but it doesn’t take one to understand the logic of Paul Krugman’s prescription for economic recovery. And like him, I’m frustrated that no one, from the “moralizers” in the Tea Party movement to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, seems to be listening.

“Fareed Zakaria GPS” will offer Paul Krugman of The New York Times and Raghuram Rajan, professor of finance at the University of Chicago. Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, says that President Barack Obama has been too timid with stimulus plans to help the battered economy. Rajan predicted the financial crisis. CNN sums up the show as “dueling economists debate solutions to the economic crisis –- and what is legislatively passable under a politically divided government.” The program starts at 10 a.m. Sunday on CNN and repeats at 1 p.m.

Hundreds of fans of the Austrian School are joining the campaign, because they realize the wonderful corner into which Krugman would be painted. He will either have to debate Austrian business-cycle theory or explain why a New York City food bank would miss out on $100,000+ in "right-wing" money.

Since I have a big review of Paul Krugman’s non-academic writing up on the home page today, I should probably comment on his latest entry into that body of work. Over the past year or so, Krugman has grown increasingly in favor of amping up our government’s confrontation with China over its foreign-exchange-rate policy. As far as I can tell, Krugman would like to see the Senate pass, and the president sign and implement, the bill that passed the House last month, which would result in the imposition of high tariffs on everything we import from China. The editors did a fair job of explaining why this policy would really have no good outcome for the United States:

Krugman dismissed the idea that Keynesianism was best suited for totalitarianism and he ignored my inquiry about the fact that the mess we are in is precisely because the US government has pursued Keynesian policies for the past eight decades.

In the former Soviet Union, the term "biznesmen" (pronounced "beeznessmen") refers to the class of sudden new rich who emerged after the fall of Communism - and who generally got rich by using their connections to strip away the assets of public enterprises. What we've learned from Enron and other players to be named later is that America has its own biznesmen - and that we need to watch out for policies that make it easier for them to ply their trade.

The effort to discredit concerns about the gap between haves and have-nots as obsolete "class warfare," along comes a real-life story that reads like a leftist morality play: wealthy executives make off with millions while ordinary workers lose their jobs and their life savings. After all that effort to convince people that the private sector can police itself, the most admired company in America turns out to have been a giant Ponzi scheme - and the most respected accounting firm turns out to have been an accomplice.

The business of most Americans is business, and Enron already ranks as one of the biggest business scandals in history. There have been other big, admired companies that failed; there have been other companies that turned out to be largely fraudulent. But Krugman can't think of another case in which the most admired company turned out to be a fraud.

Thanks to the disappearance of the budget surplus, the excess revenue collected by the payroll tax isn't being used to acquire assets, or even to pay down the federal debt; it's being used to cover deficits elsewhere in the budget.

"Mr. Bush could try to undo some of the damage, by canceling future tax cuts for the top income bracket. Instead, he wants to accelerate those cuts. That's the moral equivalent of the big bonuses Enron gave to executives just days before it went bankrupt. Horse racing is a zero-sum game; so, it seems, is budget politics. Mr. Bush hit the trifecta the great majority of Americans lost, big time, says Paul Krugman."

"When the Social Security system takes in more money than it pays out, as it does at present, this has no significance - the federal budget is unified, you see, so it doesn't mean anything when one particular piece of it is in surplus. But in 2016, when the Social Security system starts to pay out more than it takes in, there will be a crisis - Social Security, you see, must stand on its own."

"You might have expected the "stimulus" packages being floated in Washington to provide some help to state governments in this difficult time. On the contrary, they will compound the damage, says Paul Krugman."